Useful Idiots

The Smirnov Affair: MAGA Republicans Are Useful Idiots for Russian Intelligence

How GOP lawmakers got caught doing Moscow’s dirty work.

DAVID CORN

In June 2020, a businessman and fixer named Alexander Smirnov, who was also an FBI informant, passed his handler at the bureau a potentially explosive tip: The owner of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, had told him that he had paid $5 million each to Joe Biden and his son Hunter so the elder Biden, then vice president, would stop an investigation into the firm. Last year, that allegation became a key component in the Republican effort to impeach the president. But according to federal prosecutors, it was all a lie. Nine days ago, Smirnov, an Israeli and American citizen who had worked with oligarchs over the years and had been a confidential FBI source for a decade, was indicted for making false statements to federal investigators.

Smirnov’s indictment is a big deal and blows up a huge chunk of the GOP’s impeachment drive. But, more important, his allegedly phony accusation did not occur in a vacuum. It is part of a larger story of the rotten relationship between Russian intelligence and the Trump cosmos.

A year before Smirnov dropped this (presumably counterfeit) dime on the Bidens, Rudy Giuliani—who at the time was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer—took a trip to Ukraine that he publicly said was for the purpose of digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential contender. Giuliani was particularly focused on the unfounded claim that Biden, as veep, had orchestrated the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to end a probe of Burisma. Giuliani’s agenda included pressing the Ukrainian government to launch investigations that could yield derogatory information about Biden. (These Giuliani machinations would lead to Trump’s first impeachment.) In the following months, Giuliani’s endeavor was aided by Russian operatives spreading disinformation about the Bidens. In fact, Trump’s own intelligence establishment and his Treasury Department would later publicly declare that Russian agents were mounting an operation to discredit Biden to help Trump win reelection. 

It appears likely that Smirnov’s supposedly false statements to the FBI were connected to this covert Kremlin campaign. According to the prosecutors in the Smirnov case, in 2023 he told the FBI he had been in touch with Russian officials. Later, during an interview with the FBI after he was arrested, Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence had been involved in “passing a story” about Hunter, according to court filings.

Add all this up and it looks as if Russia succeeded in inserting an explosive allegation—$10 million in secret payments to the Bidens!—into the MAGA bloodstream and boosted the GOP impeachment crusade against the president. In other words, the Republicans—and all their comrades at Fox and other right-wing media outlets that trumpeted Smirnov’s allegation against the Bidens—have been useful idiots for Moscow.

The Smirnov case has generated plenty of headlines and has caused the leading Republican impeachers—namely, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan—to look foolish. (Downplaying the revelations about Smirnov, they still insist they have a case.) But it’s important to view the Smirnov affair in this wider context: Republicans and the MAGA right have eagerly participated in Kremlin scheming to undermine Biden.

This Moscow plot has been a matter of public record for years. In February 2020, intelligence officials briefed House lawmakers that Moscow was interfering in the election to assist Trump’s reelection. (This briefing, of course, angered Trump, who had refused to acknowledge that a covert program authorized by Russian leader Vladimir Putin helped him win the White House four years earlier, and he replaced the acting director of national intelligence.) Months later, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, issued a statement declaring that Russia “is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden…Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

That was related to Giuliani’s endeavor. The NCSC statement noted that a pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andriy Derkach, the son of a former KGB official, was “spreading claims about corruption…to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.” In September 2020, Derkach was sanctioned by Trump’s Treasury Department, which called him “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and declared he was one of a group of “Russia-linked election interference actors.” Treasury said Derkach had maintained “close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services” and had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.” Trump’s own Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, remarked, “Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world.” 

And who was working with Derkach to spread the false story that Joe Biden had blocked an investigation of Burisma? Giuliani. At one point, Derkach staged press conferences in Kyiv and played secretly recorded tapes of Biden speaking by phone with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Derkach insisted the recordings supported Giuliani’s allegations about Biden. Yet the tapes revealed no misconduct. This was a disinformation stunt. Ukrainians critical of Russia speculated that the tapes originated with Russian intelligence.

Giuliani never expressed shame for hooking up with a Russian agent. He publicly admitted he was in touch with Derkach and called him “very helpful.” He said that he and Derkach had spoken about Ukraine many times.

It was a bizarre situation. Giuliani, once known as “America’s Mayor,” was in cahoots with a Russian covert operation—and every Republican and Fox News host who amplified the Biden allegations he was peddling were Kremlin helpmates. When Giuliani helped make public the contents of a laptop that Hunter had left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware, conservative media seized the occasion to boost the false charges about Joe and Hunter Biden being spread by this Russian operation. (The laptop contained explosive material about Hunter, but its contents did not, as the New York Post and other right-wing outlets falsely asserted, prove the conspiracy theory that Biden had intervened to protect Burisma.)

After the 2020 election, more information emerged about Moscow’s undercover attempt to smear Joe Biden. In the final days of the Trump administration, the Treasury Department sanctioned several Derkach associates in Ukraine for disseminating and promoting “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations involving a U.S. political candidate.” These Ukrainians, the Treasury said, “have made repeated public statements to advance disinformation narratives that U.S. government officials have engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine. These efforts are consistent with and in support of Derkach’s efforts, acting as an agent of the Russian intelligence services, to influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.”  A State Department statement echoed this declaration, reporting that Derkach and his pals had pushed “malicious narratives” to affect the 2020 contest. (This past November, Ukrainian authorities charged Derkach and two of the other US-sanctioned Ukrainians with treason, contending they had colluded with Russian intelligence to assist Giuliani’s disinformation scheme.)

The bottom line: According to Trump administration officials, the Biden-Burisma allegations were in part (if not wholly) the work of Russian operatives. Yet Trump, the MAGA right, and their media allies have been beating this drum for years, and once the GOP won back the House in 2022, it became impeachment fodder. Then Comer, Jordan, and the rest of their crew embraced Smirnov’s charges, even though they were not substantiated and even though they were in sync with a known Russian disinformation plot that targeted Biden to aid Trump. Moreover, it was highly suspicious that Smirnov shared his allegations with his FBI handler in June 2020—after not mentioning them for years—just when Giuliani and other Trumpers were striving to tar Joe Biden with this false tale. 

But none of that matters for the Party of Trump and its leader. They seem unconcerned about collaborating—colluding?—with a Kremlin operation. After all, it worked for Trump in 2016, and since then he and his cult have demonstrated no reluctance to be exploited by Russia or to exploit Russian disinformation, even as Putin wages a horrendous war in Ukraine and intensifies his repressive and murderous reign at home. The Smirnov case—of which there is much more to learn—shows not only that Trump and the GOP are Putin dupes; they are willing dupes.